Highly paraffinic wax is made by a number of different refining processes. It may be further upgraded into other desirable hydrocarbon products, such as fuels, lubricants, and chemicals. As wax upgrading equipment is expensive to manufacture, and there are wax upgrading plants which are under utilized at a number of currently existing refineries, it is often desired to produce wax at one location and ship the wax to a distant location for further upgrading. The problem is that the wax is difficult to handle, especially in large quantities.
Others have shipped wax by melting it and transporting it in a molten form, selecting a high boiling cut of the wax and making hard solid pellets, making solid wax pellets and suspending them in other hydrocarbon liquids, and forming an emulsion of the wax in water. A number of these earlier shipping methods are described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/950,662, filed Sep. 28, 2004. In some situations, the shipping of granular solids can be preferred over the shipping of molten wax or slurries. One situation is when the receiving site already has facilities for handling granular solids.
Others have also shipped wax as solid particles; however these waxes had boiling points well above 800° F. such that the waxes were hard and could resist crushing. When a high boiling cut is selected, there is a wasteful loss of the up-gradable lower boiling wax. Typically these solid wax particles have been shipped in boxes or bags on pallets, where the pallets have only been loaded to about 2000 lbs per pallet. The majority of the earlier solid wax particles had low needle penetration at 25° C. Either their needle penetrations were less than 2 mm/10 at 25° C., or they were restricted to shipping in small containers so they would not break or clump together under their weight.
What is desired is a granular solid wax particle with a lower boiling cut, or having a high needle penetration by ASTM D1321, that can be shipped in bulk in the hold of a large transport vessel without clumping together or breaking. It is especially desired that vessels with large holds, such as crude oil tankers, be utilized for shipping the granular solid wax particles.